News by Subject Chemistry & Physics

Chemical engineers at EPFL have designed a material that can capture carbon dioxide from wet flue gasses better than current commercial materials. The work is published in Nature.

For the first time, researchers have been able to record, frame-by-frame, how an electron interacts with certain atomic vibrations in a solid. The technique, reported in Science, captures a process that commonly causes electrical resistance in materials while, in others, can cause the absence of resistance, or superconductivity.

As the world gathers in Madrid to discuss how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change, a newly released study makes the case that trapping emissions underground could go a long way toward solving the problem.

Adding atom-scale defects to battery materials may help them charge faster, theoretical models by Rice University scientists show.

The first flowering plants originated more than 140 million years ago in the early Cretaceous. They are the most diverse plant group on Earth with more than 300,000 species. In a new study in Communications Biology, evolutionary biologists around Agnes Dellinger and Jürg Schönenberger from the University of Vienna have analysed 3-dimensional models of flowers and found that flower shapes can evolve in a modular manner in adaptation to distinct pollinators.

Nuclear physics usually involves high energies, as illustrated by experiments to master controlled nuclear fusion. One problem is how to overcome the strong electrical repulsion between atomic nuclei which requires high energies to make them fuse. But fusion could be initiated at lower energies with electromagnetic fields that are generated by state-of-the-art free electron lasers emitting X-ray light. Researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) describe how this could be done in the journal Physical Review C.